Oct 222021
 

Noted Social Justice maniac Alec Baldwin has killed someone:

It would hardly be the first time that an actor has shot dead someone on the set of a movie using what was supposed to be a prop gun; see the death of Brandon Lee for the most famous example. But in that case, the fault was very clearly with the ordnance folks/prop masters who failed to properly clear a firearm. Something quite like that may have happened here, with either an actual live round installed instead of a blank, or a pistol with a projectile jammed in the barrel was loaded with a blank (which is what happened to Lee). But in tis case, with the exceedingly limited info available so far, it seems that the actor himself has some culpability. Because while it might be his job to point a prop gun at another actor and pull the trigger, here he shot  a director. This would *seem* to indicate that he was either careless or screwing around… or acting in a threatening manner 9given his vaunted temper…). Another possibility is that the gun was loaded with nothing but blanks, which are usually harmless at a range of more than a few yards… but deadly if fired within a few inches. And if 8that’s* the case, there’ll be some ‘splainin’ to do as to why he was pointing a gun, prop or otherwise, at a human a very short distance away.

 

 

 Posted by at 12:43 am
Oct 212021
 

China launches, apparently, nuclear-tipped (or nuclear-capable) hypersonic glide weapons into orbit, in violation of international treaty. How does the mighty US State Department respond? Why, with Sheer Manliness, of course!

If you are as confused by “International Pronouns Day” as any rational person should be, don’t worry… they have a FAQ. And why yes, thank you for asking, the executive board members are all American  academics.

International Pronouns Day – Executive Board Members

  • Founder and Co-Chair

    • Shige Sakurai, MBA, MA (they or ze), University of Maryland

  • Co-Chair

    • Crystal Huff (they), Include Better

  • Board Members:

    • Courtney D’Allaird, MBA, MA (they), University of Albany

    • Andrea Holland, MLIS (they), University of Colorado System

 

 

 Posted by at 3:55 pm
Oct 192021
 

Almost four years ago I posted about a project known as “Flashback,” a vaguely-described mid 1960’s program to carry and drop a giant *something* from a B-52. What it was, exactly, was not described with any clarity, but there were enough clues that I tentatively speculated that it was a design for an American “Tsar Bomb” with a yield of fifty or more megatons. To my knowledge I was the first person to yap about it publicly. I sent what I’d found to a few atomic and aerospace researchers to see if they knew anything. At the time, they were as mystified as I was.

Today there’s less mystery. I was contacted by one of the researchers I had contacted back then, letting me know he’s writing an article to appear in a month or so in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, covering Flashback among other things. He has Found Some Stuff. In short… Flashback was a design for a 50 to 100 megaton hydrogen bomb.

Giggitty.

 

 Posted by at 10:49 pm
Oct 192021
 

Student at ultra-liberal $80,000-a-year Oberlin College complains that contractors hired to install radiators in ‘women and trans safe space’ dorm rooms were ‘cisgender men’

Wow. *He* is upset that men installed a radiator in his room. Because there are just so many women in the radiator installation field, I guess?

You can read this delicate snowflake’s editorial here:

Male Workers Allowed Into Baldwin, Unsettling Residents

And if you think this idjit is alone in being an Oberlin idjit, allow me to introduce you to:

Why Must International Students Assimilate?

Where someone with the name of “Aishwarya Krishnaswamy” complains about:

When I introduce myself to people, I often receive a “You don’t expect me to say that, right?” in reference to my name. When I went with my friends to Walmart and struggled in the self-checkout counter — having been to Walmart no more than five times in my entire life — my friends were impatient and uncomfortable, slowly skirting away from me. When I sit in conversations laden with American-centric references, I reach a point where tuning out the conversation is easier than asking for the 10th time, “What does that mean?” I’ve even walked into my professor’s office hours and introduced myself, only to have them ask, “Do you have a shorter name?”

And then the absolute topper on the cake of woke idiocy and self-important privilege:

As a foreigner here, I am eager to learn aspects of this new culture, but I refuse to do that at the cost of my identity. Two years ago, it was not easy to brush away subtle acts of “othering,” such as exclusively conversing in American references — on cinema, music, politics, sports, etc. — or mocking me for not doing things the “right” way, not realizing that what happens in this country is just a way, not the way, of doing things. I am a third-year now, and not one thing has changed.

Holy shit, dude. You came to a completely different country and surrounded yourself – of your own free will – with people from that other country. And you’re cheesed off that they converse about *their* culture? you’re PO’ed that Americans in America see the American way of doing things as the right way of doing things? Ummm… what do you call Americans who go to *your* homeland and bitch about the way things are done there?

I have high hopes that that pendulum will swing back, sooner rather than later. With that swing will come the acceptance that some people are just crazy; they deserve our sympathy, our help and hospitalization, but society does not deserve to have their increasingly bizarre and unreality-based  desires foisted upon it.

 Posted by at 4:12 pm
Oct 192021
 

I recently came across something on ebay that looked interesting; the buy-it-now price is a bit steep, so I googled it. Huzzah! It’s available online as a PDF. D’oh: my antivirus program freaked out that the connection to the university website is insecure. Huzzah! It has been archived on the Wayback machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210627145321/http://users.umiacs.umd.edu/~oard/apollo/LOR_News_Conference.pdf

This is a writeup, with photos and diagrams, of the July 11, 1962 news conference at NASA headquarters where the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous technique was described. prior to the the understanding was that the Apollo Command and Service Modules would land directly on the lunar surface; this sounds easy, but required a bigger booster than the Saturn V and would have put the astronauts far above the lunar surface (so far as I know, no determination of how exactly the astronauts were going to get some fifty or more feet down, and then fifty or more feet back up). LOR entailed the use of the Lunar Excursion Module,a  small, lightweight spacecraft that could zip on down the the surface from lunar orbit and then hop on back up. Far less mass needed to go to the lunar surface, meaning the planned Saturn C-5 (later Saturn V) could take care of the whole mission in one shot. No need to assemble spacecraft in Earth orbit using multiple launches of hardware and propellant tankers.

Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.

 Posted by at 3:37 pm